The Modernization of Emacs: not dumb down

[Xah Lee]

Here are some Frequently Asked Questions about The Modernization of
Emacs.

They are slightly lengthy, so i've separated each item per post. The
whole article can be found at
http://xahlee.org/emacs/modernization.html
------------

Q: Why should emacs want to be popular and why should emacs change to
conform the majority? We don't want emacs to be popular. We want
people to adopt emacs, not emacs adopting people.

A: This attitude has plagued unix and computer geekers for decades. In
the early 1990s (DOS and unix), tech geekers would sneer at graphical
menus and mouse, with hordes of reasons how pure text interface, the
command line, and or keyboard operations are sufficient and superior
than graphical user interface or using a mouse. This seems ridiculous
today, but such online forum messages are common.

The reason for these type of attitude, is almost never a sensible
alternative view about the topic in discussion, but a show of machismo
and superiority complex. (perhaps more than 95% of online computing
forum users are males, and majority of them are aged under 25.) The
person who utters such opinion, made sure in the way he writes that he
is a expert in the “more difficult to use” method or tools and would
prefer things not to be “dumbed down”.

It is silly to retort “Why should emacs want to be popular?”. It is
like asking “why do you want to live longer?” when someone is picky
about healthy food, or “why should you want to look beautiful?” when
someone dresses up. We want to improve software, not taking the
attitude of “we are more complex and unique and superior and we want
to keep dummies out”.

In software design, occasionally we are tied down with a design
decision, such that it has a popular vs elegant aspect. For example,
suppose we are designing a set of keyboard shortcuts for emacs and we
are faced the question of whether to keep the copy/paste/undo/open etc
with the conventional C/V/Z/O etc keystrokes. Or, we can choose to
sacrifice user's familiarity of conventions but obtain a keyboard
shortcut set that is in some way more consistent, extensible, or
otherwise technically better.

If a design decision comes down to a pure popularity vs elegance and
everything else equal, then the decision might be based on our
philosophical dispositions or the software creator's ultimate goal.
However, it is not proper to pigeon-hole design issues into popularity
vs elegance.

  Xah
  xah at xahlee.org
∑ http://xahlee.org/